


where the needle leads me

by encroix



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-03
Updated: 2013-08-03
Packaged: 2017-12-22 07:05:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/910334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/encroix/pseuds/encroix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her bones are an anchor; her body, a guide. Or: how Mako Mori becomes a point on Raleigh's compass.</p>
            </blockquote>





	where the needle leads me

He forgets about the growing pains.

They had talked about it at the Academy once or twice, growing into new co-pilots the way you need to grow into your own body, the way you need to know which parts of you have changed and no longer work the way they used to. It feels like that, after, with her. His head weighted down with new memories that aren't his, his skin hyperaware of her presence, her closeness, finding new irritations and annoyances that never used to bother him before. (And that is a joyful discovery in its own: that she has so many, that she walks around with a flat expression and feels _so much_.)

They come back to the Shatterdome and his mind puts the wrong pieces of the puzzle together, walks him down the wrong set of passageways, walks him past his own room towards hers. And when he turns back towards his own to correct the mistake, she's leaning against the opposite wall, wearing his smirk and his slouch, her thumbs jammed into her front pockets and tugging.

He swallows hard, feels the hum of desire settle in his blood like fine dust against the skin. (That's the thing about growing up in the Jaeger academy with your brother as your co-pilot; you never have to worry about awkward situations like this, about what your partner - your _co-pilot_ \- can hear or can't hear, or what they think of everything that they see inside your head, or what they think about what you think of them.)

"That's my room," she says, her mouth curling around a smile, and his body arcs towards her voice.

"I know," he says, "I was just heading back to mine."

"Okay," she says, and he can hear the laugh behind it. He thinks about kissing her, and the corners of her mouth lift, just slightly, enough to know - enough to _see_ \- the giant grin hiding behind it.

He forgets that part, too - being careful. Somehow all he remembers when he's with her is the feeling of flying. Of weightlessness, of throwing himself to something else's mercy, to the adrenaline rush that hums through him that reminds him that yes, he is here, yes, he is alive, yes, somewhere, there is laughter.

She takes a step towards him as he crosses, as he passes her, and he can feel it - the shift in the air, the weight of her body and the weight of his own, the way they float towards each other like an inevitability - and passes to his own doorway. Leans against the door and fumbles for the keys in his pockets.

She whispers something he doesn't catch.

He turns, and she is there, taking the keys out of his hand, pushing past him into the room.

 

(They don't sleep together. 

Not like that. Not the first night.

There are too many other things to consider. There is the heaviness of bodies in beds, the way her elbow pokes him in the ribs in the middle of the night, the way he is too tall for her depending on how they move in the midst of sleep; there is the way they dream together and how dreams aren't reality but feel like it, especially when there are mouths meeting and kisses that feel like prayers, and the ocean rocking beneath your feet, beneath your bodies, like a chorus.

He sleeps through the night for the first night in a long while.

She wakes up two minutes before he does. Watches him sleep. Watches his expression settle into a blank calm, notes the way he shifts and snorts in his sleep, shoving his elbow over his face.

Thinks about kissing him.

Doesn't.

 

 

_and didn't you learn all western stories start like this?_

_didn't you learn that sleeping is a kind of death,_

_that love is an agent far beyond its power, that can bring people back to life, that can urge them between worlds?_

 

He sleeps. She lets him.)

 

 

In the morning, they sit over breakfast at one of the tables in the mess, lay their hands on either side of their meal trays and try not to stare at each other and grin. Max trots over from another table, eats the food straight out of her hand, licks her palm and her knuckles.

"So what now?" And she pats the dog on the head, scratches behind his ears. Raleigh ducks his head, itches for the soft scrape of her nails against his skin.

Instead, he leans his chin against the butt of his palm, wrinkles his forehead at her. "What?"

"You've done this before," she answers, spearing at a piece of yellowflower. "What happens now?"

He huffs a laugh. "With my _brother_. I did this with my brother before. Things are… different."

"Different," she echoes. And the question sits on the tip of her tongue; he sees it, presses his tongue to the backs of his teeth, thinks of how to answer. And even then, knowing the answer doesn't make things any easier; this is new territory; she is his co-pilot, and those aren't the things you should say to someone who fights beside you like that. Who could probably kick your teeth in.

"You're…"

She looks up, her eyelashes catching the light, her mouth pursed. "I'm…?"

He thinks of stars. Thinks of oceans. Thinks of fissures in the earth, thinks of relentless sheets of rain drumming down against umbrellas. Everything awash in blue. Drowning in color. 

Thinks of a lifetime spent looking in the wrong direction.

_north_ , he thinks.

 

 

He sleeps with her like a sailor clinging to a craggy rock in the sea. Buries his head in the crook of her shoulder, tastes the salt of her skin in secret moments, waits for her hands to settle in his hair, to scrape along the top of his head, to scratch against the bare skin of his chest in slow, methodical motions, to caress, to remember.

Her bones are an anchor; her body, a guide.

She keeps him in the middle of the night, wraps her legs around his, holds him against her warmth so that he will forget the cold of Alaska, so he forgets the chill of grief still coursing its way through the marrow of his bones, so he begins to forget time and its relentless pursuit of motion. 

There are soft kisses against the crown of his head and he hopes that she forgives him - for what, it doesn't matter, just that she does, just that somebody does and it might as well be her, might as well be the person who had to bear witness to everything in his life as well as her own - or, failing that, that she will remember him as another fighter, and not a scared boy hiding in her arms at night.

_raleigh_ , she says, slurring the word, mumbling it, drawing it out like a long-held breath. _it's okay. you're okay._

And when she says it, he believes her. If just for that second.

 

(but a second's too long a time, or haven't you been paying attention?)

 

 

It's a question of tides.

After the drift, there is pull, the way the moon holds sway over tides, the way planets hold sway over each other, the way things stabilize into orbit. It is finding a path as much as finding a way to exist together, a stable system in itself, a group-as-individual instead of just individuals in a group.

He becomes aware of her even when she isn't in the room. _Especially_ when she isn't in the room. His head will start to ache with her presence, will lean towards the direction of her body the way plants reach for sunlight, will hear her laughter, ache for her touch and feel the ghost of it all at once. Always too light a touch, too, the memory, like her fingertips just trailing over the skin of his arm.

_the deeper the bond_

Yes, he'd said that, but he'd forgotten all the caveats that come with that greater strength. There is greater need, too, and greater reliance and now, things are different. Now, he is his own person; now, he is fighting alongside someone who is not his brother. Who he hasn't spent his entire life defining himself against ( _not a natural, like Yancy; not broad or scrappy, like Yancy; not as good as Yancy_ ), who he must now pick out from his own thoughts and recognize it as separate. A separate voice. A separate person.

Had he always liked the taste of barley green tea, or only recently? And what of the soft, delicate taste of agar? Was that something he knew too, growing up in Alaska? On the base?

Is he only thinking of 羊羹? And is that his?

The problem, restated: larger planets can dwarf smaller ones, can drag asteroids into their gravity, or other moons, and make them think they are planets; can make them believe they are involved in a system that has a use for them, when instead there is nothing other than the fact that you were caught in something greater, in the undertow they warn you about before you begin to drown.

_the deeper the bond_ , yes, but her voice speaks with his words in his head, her voice speaks over his voice, her voice is everything and he can't pick it out from what he is supposed to sound like. What was his voice before Yancy…? And now that there has been more distance, more time, now that he has found another partner, has his voice changed? Is it meant to sound the same as before? 

In his head, he hears her laugh. In his head, he hears her sing, straining for high notes and passing into breathy laughs.

His feet stutter along the sea bed, scratch along loose pebbles. She pulls him out to sea, and his neck strains to catch sight of the shoreline, to remember where it is he started drifting, and how far he's gone. 

To see if he can recognize where he finds himself now.

 

 

Weeks later, there will come the after. The punch that comes with momentum gained too quickly, the scrape of the knee after the fall. She will look at him and know too much about him, will see the parts of him that he tries to hide from others, will see the parts of him that he doesn't see in himself.

Another mess hall, another meal. She lays her hands flat on either side of the tray, peers down at the food. _…and are you thinking of leaving?_

The truth of it sits between the salt and pepper shakers. 

He has thought of it. He has considered it time and time again. Knowing a direction doesn't make him less directionless; he was once a boy running towards something, and now there is nothing to run to; he was also once a boy running away from people that had run away, and now there is nothing to run from; the world has marched on without him and he is trying to find his bearings, trying to catch up, only to realize the map has been upside down the entire time.

These are excuses. He knows that.

She knows that, too. Accepts his silence with her hands lying open and flat against the metal of the table, her expression a practiced relaxed one. 

Her eyes drop to the tray of food, her jaw ticking. (Always how Yancy carried himself when he was angry or disappointed.)

"I wouldn't blame you," she says. "The Shatterdome was not your home." She pauses, corrects herself. " _Is_ not." Says it so simply, like a parent correcting a child. 

And he lifts the fork in his hand, making a small noise as it hits against the edge of the tray. "No," he says. "It was." 

And that is the problem, and that is the riddle, for how can he belong to a home that he has only found weeks ago? How can he belong to a place that no longer has Gipsy, that only has empty hangars and hundreds and thousands of people milling around like there is still work to be done, like the shadow of the war they just ended does not also mean separations and leavings, does not also mean that they will have to return to life before the war? Will have to go back to mortgages and worrying about how to feed their children, about the rich and the poor, and the lines drawn among people. About boundaries and time zones.

"I don't belong here," he says.

And she winces, that wrinkle in the space between her eyebrows deepening. And her voice, so strong in his head, _how can you say that? here is the only place you belong_. 

But she takes a deep breath, levels her expression. "There's work to be done here. The crew needs you here, and you're thinking of going… where exactly?"

"Just thinking about it," he says, shoving around the wilting lettuce leaves of his salad. "I didn't say that I was going for sure."

"But you…"

"I…?"

"Never mind."

_there is work, there is work, you can stay, you have a place here_

"What?"

A flicker of a smile on her mouth. "You were in my head," she says, she repeats - hadn't he said something like that? are those his words or hers, or both of theirs? - and she licks her lips. _you know what i'm thinking_. Takes a bite of her food. Chews thoughtfully.

Yes, he is in her head; yes, she is in his; yes, they are both present, but the thing the Jaeger academy never told you - knowing the landscape doesn't change the fact of its being a puzzle, doesn't change the fact that the terrain can suddenly shift beneath your feet; 

doesn't change the fact that as much as he knows her mind, he doesn't know her heart.

 

 

(a long ago voice, a whisper like a breath: _her heart_ ,

 

and he can't remember the other half of the question)

 

 

Later, over egg tarts in the heart of the boneslum, she says _i wouldn't want to keep you if going is what you really want._

He feeds her a piece of egg tart. Her teeth graze the pad of his thumb.

"That's not how you eat it," she says.

"I know," he says. He feeds her another piece anyway, and her mouth smiles against his skin.

 

(and later, you will ask yourself

_was that goodbye?_ )

 

 

He packs a bag.

Hears her voice in his head. Keeps a list - reasons to stay, reasons to go - and what of her name, written all over the margins as a reminder? And the doodles, the stray characters that float on the edges of his thoughts, are those meant to remind him that he has half of himself invested in someone else? That she has seen him and stayed, and seen what he has done and stayed, and heard his thoughts and stayed?

She looks at him over breakfast, over lunch, and wonders when he will leave. If leaving is an eventuality.

And he thinks for her, he could break tides. Orbits. For her, he could fight every impulse to the last. 

 

 

He stays.

 

(There are, of course, other consequences. The lesson in momentum, here: nothing can happen without an equal and opposite reaction; to throw a punch means something must receive it, must move backward as you move forward.

 

 

She starts to carry his resentment in her walk, the strut less pronounced, the shoulders angled down towards the floor. The doors suddenly closed with more force, the distance between them in his bed growing greater.

One night, she sleeps with her back to him, and the question slips out: _do you want me to leave?_

_no_ , "No," she says, _but you can't keep walking around like this_

She runs her hand through his hair and it feels like a kiss. He closes his eyes, shudders against her touch. Leans forward to kiss her jaw only to have her shift away.

"Nothing is stopping you," she whispers, and he leans his forehead down against her shoulder, presses his hot mouth to her collarbone.

_you are_ , and she stiffens, she pushes away from him, and he shakes his head, his teeth scraping a line against her neck, against her shoulder, _no, you are the only thing that makes sense, you are the only thing i can remember about myself, you are…_

Her hands are warm on either side of his face, and he leans his cheek against her palm. The scratch of her callused knuckles meeting the growing stubble along his jaw.

_and will you come back?_

And he leans in close, kisses her. Takes her bottom lip between his, his tongue swiping along the edge of her mouth.

Remembers the taste of her, remembers the soft noise of her breath, of the way her moans lurk low in her throat.

He was supposed to _change_ , he was supposed to become better, be different, he was supposed to leave Alaska in the other time zone, where it belongs.)

 

 

He spends his last night on the base in her room, in her bunk. There are new things to be witnessed here, new parts of herself to reveal to him, and he lays on her mattress and tries to memorize it. The posters on the wall, the small pictures pressed into the corner of the mirror, the way everything has a place yet small paper notes are scattered across the top of the dresser like dried leaves in the street.

They don't speak.

She crawls into his arms instead, and he spends the night holding her, letting her brush the side of her cheek against the soft fabric of his shirt and pretending that he doesn't feel her tears welling behind her eyes. There's a resoluteness there, too, to keep them where they are. 

She has cried enough. They both have.

_what are you doing?_ , he asks himself, his brother asks him, he hears himself ask his father. _where are you going?_

And maybe in the end, everyone ends up being their father's son - their father's daughter - and his was always a sorry son-of-a-bitch that ran away whenever he was needed. Maybe you go around remembering how everyone leaves and after a while, you learn that leaving people means never having to say goodbye on anyone else's terms.

Maybe that takes the sting out of being left. (Maybe he's full of bullshit. Maybe that, too.)

She shoves her knuckles underneath his chin, knocks them against his shoulder. _look at me_ and he does. Her eyes a rich brown in the dim light, and bright. Awake. Aware.

_raleigh, listen to me_ , and he shakes his head, _no, yancy, no, mako, no,_ and she says, "Look at me." He does. Her hand finds the back of his neck, fingertips playing in his hair. Her voice shakes, but she wills it to still. "You are _more_ than what has happened to you. Trust me." 

And he ducks his head, knocks it against her shoulder, feels her hand slide down the base of his neck, down his spine. He holds his breath, releases it in short pants against her shoulder and tries to believe this is what he must be running away from and not running toward, that he is doing the right thing by making sure that she has her own track and is not swallowed up in his continued collapse.

( _where would you rather die_ )

She curls around him, throws a leg around his, presses her mouth against his shirt until he can feel the heat of her breath.

"I'll be here," she says. She answers.

His laugh is wry. A sad, bitter thing. "I don't know why," he says. On the wall of his bedroom, there are a thousand memorials - photos upon photos from a thousand different places, each one he'd been at a few weeks, a few months, not enough to constitute a whole stay. Except for Peru. Except for Alaska. Except for his brother, and her, and Stacker -

"Don't think about it. I'll be here."

 

 

Live long enough with the drift and everything starts to feel strange when it's ordered. Memories in the drift are messy; fast flashes, non-chronological, skimming just over your field of vision long enough for you to remember, long enough for you to _hurt_ before the next one comes. And outside the drift, there is nothing. There is time.

There is steady progression and linear movement. Inflexibility for the kinds of things the drift makes you used to.

And what happens? Where does he go? (As if it matters -

the point is that he leaves, that there is a departure point, that he makes his way along the map and tries to find places where he left himself, places where bits of Gipsy Danger float like debris and wait to be collected to remind him who he is, remind him of the person he used to be.

He spends time running, packing, hearing the beat of his shoes keeping time against the ground.

And is it any different? Floating among the stars and trying to remember who he is outside of the pull, and has anything changed?

He speeds up, chases himself even faster. A dog at its own tail.)

 

He writes her letters that he doesn't send. Small envelopes collected into twine-tied bundles that start to own a corner of his suitcase.

Little things. _i love you_ and _i miss you_ and _i'm sorry i was wrong_ and

_you never needed me anyway_.

Little things.

Too minor to warrant being sent.

 

 

There's a story:

a boy grows up fighting the world; the world goes away; what becomes of the boy?

 

 

Or, is it a riddle?

 

 

Or, a joke?

The punchline: the boy is both the world and the boy, the boy fights himself, the boy fights movement that reminds him the world still spins.

 

(And she has stories, too. Keeps them in the letters she writes in response to the ones he doesn't write, doesn't send; tells him little things happening on the base, stories of Tendo's trials of parenthood, of Max and Herc and finding ways to shutter parts of the base without losing the entire thing to bureaucracy and the false notion of finality around the kaiju war.

Other things, too, lingering like secrets between the lines.

_i wasn't ever good at this_

_please come back_

_you are the only one i have left_

And isn't that ambiguous, isn't that easy to solve, isn't that an answer in itself? The ink bleeds and she tears the notes into sixteenths, scatters the pieces like ashes over the top of her dresser, over her floor.

 

The punchline:

a girl grows up scared of the world, and of the monsters that live in the dark, and finds light

loses light

tries to find it again, tries to keep it, tries to become it

 

Or, is it a joke?

A problem to be solved?

 

Or, was she the darkness all along?)

 

 

 

She finds him. (Does it matter how?

 

Say they are linked; say there is a connection and she feels the pull drag along her body like the wind in freefall; say she finds herself flitting from spot to spot on the map and missing him by mere footsteps;

say they are together, even when they aren't.)

 

She notes a fixture in one of her dreams. Looks out a window and spots a familiar landmark. Takes a plane.

Follows the trail of him. His confusion, his placelessness, his yearning.

Knocks on a door.

Waits.

 

 

He opens the door, and grunts, a noise that follows a hard punch, that follows an unexpected hit; then: the reaction. He hooks an arm around her neck, pulls her towards him.

She stumbles into his body, her mouth hitting the crook of his shoulder, and then there is just his hands cupping her face, tilting it up to look at him, tilting it up so he can lean down and kiss her. Everything else is gravity - what else to do when your compass finds _you_ , what else to do when you are found, when someone seeks you out like a revelation - and falling.

He kicks the door shut behind her, pushes her up against it. Holds her up with his own weight, pins her against it with his hips. Kisses her until she's laughing, until her cheeks are wet with tears, until her lips are swollen and tingle; none of it is enough.

She strips him of his vest, of the gray knit sweater he has on, and he pulls at her coat, bunches the fabric of her outfit in his hands, pulls and pulls to get at her bare skin.

"I missed you," he murmurs against her mouth, and somewhere inside her, tolling like a hard truth, is the thought that they are kissing for the first time.

(And the dreams?

…what to make of the dreams where this has already happened, where her body remembers the feeling of his hands without knowing for sure?)

He pulls away from her mouth, his hands skimming the bare skin of her hip, and huffs, mumbling an apology. He caught the edge of the last thought, must have, must be thinking of another hundred things that don't matter right now.

"For what?" she asks.

"This isn't how I thought it'd go," he says, with a small laugh. "The first time."

"How?" she asks, as he lowers his mouth to her pulse and sucks. Her voice catches on a gasp, and the rest stutters out, "How did you…think it would?"

"I don't know," he says, and he leads her to the bed. Her legs knock against the edge of the mattress and she sinks down against it as he leans down, bracing his arms on either side of her. His weight, everywhere. His weight, his smell. 

She reaches up, pulls his dogtags _hard_ , drags her mouth over his. A slow, messy kiss.

"Thought it'd be somewhere else," he says, as she rolls them over, grinds her hips over his. "Better furniture, for one."

Her nose brushes his as she leans down. "You think I'd be paying attention to furniture?"

"You pay attention to everything," he says, leaning up to nip at her lip. "Why not furniture?"

Her giggle is warm, young.

"Thought I'd get you dinner first," he says, and she unclasps her bra, shrugs out of it. "Tell you I love you, buy you something. Old-fashioned, I guess."

She stills, and he reaches for her hand. 

_you love me?_

He brushes his free hand through his hair, tucking his chin to his chest with a quiet laugh. "Thought that would have gone better, too."

She shoves her hand hard against his bare chest. "Shut up," she says. "Stop talking."

She spends that night with him in the small bed that he has in his cabin, in the bedframe that he built himself, in the flat, barren landscape of the Exclusion Zone on the coast of Oregon.

_how did you end up here?_ , she wants to ask. But there isn't time for any of those questions.

She doesn't ask any more. Just tries to remember the feeling of her body against his, tries to memorize the peculiar rhythm of his heartbeat, the sturdiness of him. 

 

 

She doesn't stay.

 

(This isn't her city; this isn't her home; he is here, but some things cannot be fixed by other bodies, other weights.

This isn't home, and she doesn't chase places she knows she doesn't belong.

She has always been rooted; running has always left her dizzy and a little nauseous.)

 

 

The morning she leaves, he spends the rest of the day in the cabin. She has left hours ago; she has left and her smell carries in the small space. Clings to his sheets, his clothes; her laughs stick to the walls. 

Outside, it is snowing; outside, it is beginning to grow dark, and all he wants to do is bury himself underneath a dozen layers of blankets and forget that the world is waiting for him to do something.

On the corner of a napkin in the trash, her lipstick print. Funny how these things find him. Funny how he is always found out. 

 

 

Build a wall; build a house; and all the same, they never seem to lose track of him. First, Stacker; now, her, and the question hasn't changed, has it? All those years and all those battles and now, no more fighting, and the question is still the same.

_where would you rather die_

_here?_

alone

_in a jaeger?_

together

 

Build a house; build a wall; still doesn't stop the rush of river water that breaks all dams, that wears away stone.

 

 

The note comes in a few weeks later:

_i'm leaving hong kong. jaeger program decommissioned._

 

 

He packs up the cabin. Shutters the windows. 

Takes the first flight back to Hong Kong he can find.

 

 

The Shatterdome is quiet when he arrives. Most of the crew have already been moved off-site and there's barely a hum of machinery and people. The news he fishes from whoever he recognizes on his way towards his old room - most of the machinery to be scuttled or given back to the individual governments, the Shatterdome to become used to conduct in-house research only, to monitor the breach for any future movements. Gossip was always more accurate than the brass wanted it to be.

He finds Herc first, sitting in the hall, peering at the basketball hoop still fixed to the stanchion. 

"It's all over, kid," he says, and Raleigh ducks his head. Feels Mako's disappointment in the gesture. They could have fought harder. They should have. "Guess I shouldn't be surprised."

Spend your whole life fighting for something, and what happens when it's gone? What happens when you win?

Raleigh knocks his hand against his leg for lack of anything to say.

Herc brushes his closed hand over his mouth, turns away from the basketball hoop. "If you're looking for her, she's in the lab."

"I didn't say…"

He snorts. "You didn't need to."

 

 

She isn't in the lab.

He finds her, instead, in the hangar, peering out from the landing at all the empty Jaeger docks. She turns before he calls her name, doesn't say anything.

He goes to meet her (and hasn't he always?). 

"Strange," she says. He counts off the names in his head when he looks from one spot to the other - Crimson, Cherno, and just there would be his girl, all new and polished with new parts and a new life, a chance to do something good. Second chances, the both of them.

"We won," he says. "What's strange about it?"

She leans forward against the rail. "I didn't know what you were going to do. Whether you were going to stay in Oregon."

He closes his eyes, feels the rhythm of her breathing, times his own to match hers. "I don't think I could anymore."

Her forehead wrinkles. "Why?"

"You."

She purses her lips, turns to look at him, blinks twice. "What are you…?"

He ducks his head, feels her blush on his cheeks. "Wherever you are," he says. "That's just…where I should be."

"I love you," she answers, so quiet he nearly misses it. "Did you find what you were looking for?"

He shakes his head.

"No?"

"I don't think I _know_ what I was looking for."

"So what did you find?"

"Something I had to fix." She nods once, a firm gesture, and turns back to the empty hangar. She understands. She has to. She built something up from nothing, once, and understood that it was more than just puzzle pieces and manual labor, schematics and adjustments; love is what makes things alive again, even after years of being broken.

"And you fixed it?"

He hums. "I think so. Maybe I'm still fixing."

She knocks her weight against him. "And when you find it… I mean, when you're finished…" 

_will you let me know?_

He kisses the top of her head.

 

 

They're packing up the last of the nonessential equipment when one of the scientists finds it. He's a little manic this morning, hyped up on coffee and whatever else, and grins at the both of them, waving the electrodes in front of them. "One last drift, you guys? For old times' sake?"

He thinks about it. More than part of him wants to. The drift… It's something he can't explain, even when he tries. Even when he has her vocabulary at his disposal. Being closer to someone else than to yourself, knowing someone else as well as - or better than - you know yourself. Seeing inside someone's head and feeling like a whole person, if just for that moment.

The Kaidonovskys had one of the longest neural handshakes on record. The number of things they could have shared in that time… it makes him a little dizzy to think of it all.

Mako stares forward, arches a brow. And maybe she's absorbed enough of his recklessness to want to, maybe she's just as desperate for experiencing it one final time - 

She looks at him, and he remembers the memory of meeting her for the first time. Remembers the way time slowed, the way the rain drummed against her umbrella, the way she lifted her head up to look at him. The shade of her lipstick.

She shakes her head, and he tries to keep his face neutral. Tries to control his reaction.

"I… don't think I'm ready," she says. "… to see him again."

He nods. 

 

 

They fly to Manila. Most of the damage has been cleared away, and the water begins to push through, clean and blue, in patches. He walks along the water line, picking up driftwood and thinks about building her something. The world deserves some kind of monument to her, and maybe he's one to build it; a house, maybe, to keep her, or a small solarium in the back of a regular house or an oversized apartment to capture the light, to keep her warm and bright, to chase away the monsters.

She turns to him and smiles, the light catching in her hair.

"You're beautiful," he says, ducking his head, and she turns, juts her hip out, hooks a thumb through the loop of her pants. 

_i'd follow you anywhere_

And is this what being kept is like? Is this finding a place? Like when they were kids and Yancy showed him how to jerry-rig a compass the way he saw on tv, magnetizing a needle and floating it on a leaf and watching it spin circles and circles, maybe he's just decided that it doesn't matter where the needle goes; maybe it's that the needle was always going to point to her, track her wherever she went.

Maybe it isn't about finding out more about himself, but about fixtures to guide by. Like the old sailors and the stars.

She turns back towards him, presses a gentle kiss to his mouth. "Want to watch the sunset?"

He sets his hand against the small of her back, lets her lean against him, stands until his legs ache to watch the sun set over the water, to see the way the light spills in a thousand different directions over the top of the water. Light breaking into all of its halves and parts, light becoming more light.

"I want to build you a house," he says, and she goes silent. Bites down hard on her lip.

"Not here?" she laughs, and he laughs back, echoes her laughter, hears the light in it.

"Here, there, wherever you want."

 

 

The longer he thinks on it, the more he becomes enamored with the idea.

They spend eight months in Manila, corresponding with the time she's contracted to serve on the PPDC council on the future of the Jaeger program and international cooperation in anti-kaiju litigation.

He spends days sitting in her office, listening to her work. Whittles small things out of the driftwood he finds on the beach. Draws schematics in his head. Little things. Bay windows, maybe; blue shutters, but a light blue - still her color, but less melancholy; Stacker's photo hanging with her parents in a study or an office; an open kitchen.

Instead, he carves her name into the underside of her desk. Scatters pieces of her around the world in case he decides to wander again. In case he loses sight of a guiding star and ends up across another ocean.

 

 

There are contracting jobs in Russia, Vietnam, China, Indonesia. She picks up whatever she can, and they move like that for a while - she with the work, he after her, and always, in and out of hotel rooms and suitcases and making home wherever they end up for the night, for the week.

Wherever the PPDC has funding to place them.

They make a trip to Alaska for her reports on the status of the Jaeger Academy, and he shows her his old neighborhood, gives her a tour of the academy building. She's been to Anchorage before, he knows, but she lets him talk anyway, and they walk through the streets like that, hand in hand, for hours.

(Dozing off against him on the plane, she murmurs something, a small question. _and are you okay with all of this?_ Outside, the sky is bright blue and the plane's been pretty smooth. He misses piloting, he misses Gipsy, but he doesn't miss everything else. Doesn't miss waking up before dawn to run calisthenics and drills, doesn't miss the rank problems and training new recruits, doesn't miss his place as a piece in a machine.

"Yeah," he says, and brushes his fingers against the nape of her neck. "You should sleep."

_do you miss it?_

And he thinks of years spent chasing ghosts, thinks of years wasted running from place to place and hoping to find out that this would be the year he would finally discover the kind of person that he was, and always, in his head, the voice of his father thundering after him, the voice of his father thundering after and the footsteps retreating, and finding there was only ever Yancy, and him; and losing Yancy, and losing a voice, and losing himself.

He could be lost again. 

He chooses to let the tide take him wherever he belongs. Trusts that over his own mind.)

 

 

It's Japan. (It was always Japan.)

Along the edge of coast, a small spot near the water, full of light, the sand coarse and giving underneath their weight.

 

 

He builds a house.

 

 

 

She says, _and you're sure you're not…_

He presses his mouth to the top of her hand, kisses the curve of the knuckle. "I love you." And in it, all the other phrases - _you were always north_ , _there is nothing else but you_ , _a guide for whenever i feel like i could become lost_ \- and all the other words. 

She brushes her hand at her eyes, and leans against him. Kisses him until her tears are falling against his cheeks. 

_you are everything_

"Could you stay here?" she asks. And he looks nowhere but the openness of her face, her eyes, open wide with anticipation, with _wanting_ , even with her attempts to temper the rest of her expression. "I wouldn't want you to think you have to. For me."

He cups her face, kisses her and kisses her until she is leaning against him, sinking into his weight. And this, too, cannot be underestimated - the way minor planets can start to command a little weight of their own. She pulls away and there is shifting sand underneath her feet and she says, "Be honest."

As if there was anything else. As if he needed to. As if she wasn't already in his head and hearing his thoughts.

He says, "I'm staying with you."

"No more running?"

She wraps her arms around him, rests her head against his chest. His hands rub small circles against her back, and he thinks that's the wrong question. Not that he isn't going to run - he is always going to run - but that now there is only running circles. That no matter where he goes, he will always end up back here with her.

"I don't know," he says. "But now there's an end point."

She looks up, catches his gaze. Nods. "A destination?" Always understanding him better than he understands himself.

He kisses the tip of her nose. "Yeah. A destination."

_a destiny_

 

 

He learns to live by her like the way small villages learn to live by the river. Comes to know nothing else, comes to believe nothing else but that truth: the river is life; the river is direction; the river becomes an entire world. 

His body becomes more than his body, becomes an extension of hers, becomes a monster in its own right. Grows to remember her mannerisms as well as his, her habits as well as his. Starts to enjoy the taste of tamarind, crave the bitterness of medicinal tea.

He moves with her and forgets how to move otherwise, confuses her gravity for the turn of the earth. Doesn't care to correct the mistake.

 

 

_i love you_ , she says, and he remembers a childhood spent looking at the stars and hoping to find an answer

 

 

(and the answer?

you were always looking in the wrong direction, and now you have corrected; now you have a direction to look towards; 

 

 

now, you are no longer searching.)


End file.
